[1.03] Tycho Brahe's Copernican Campaign

Historians of astronomy have generally assumed that the Ptolemaic and
Copernican systems give equivalent predictions of planetary positions,
but Tycho Brahe knew that in the Ptolemaic arrangement Mars' distance was
always greater than the sun's, whereas in the Copernican system Mars at
opposition approached to half the sun's distance. Because Tycho accepted
the traditional solar distance scale, 20 times too small, he expected to
measure a Martian diurnal parallax of 4.5' at opposition if the Copernican
system was true. (In reality the horizontal parallax was too small to
measure by naked-eye observations.)
Hence, during the golden decade of the 1580s at Hven, Tycho
undertook a major campaign to find Mars' parallax. Observations at the
opposition of 1582-83 failed, according to a letter he wrote in 1584.
The campaign at the next opposition led to frustration, but after the
1587 opposition he claimed that in fact he had already found the parallax
in 1582. Was Tycho merely prevaricating because he wanted to have an
observational basis for his new Tychonic cosmology?
During this decade Tycho gradually became aware of the role of
refraction, and much of the new instrumentation built at Stjerneborg
seems to have been motivated by this problem. Using an erroneously
chosen refraction table Tycho apparently convinced himself of a large
parallax for Mars. He may well have discovered his error by 1592, for he
never again claimed to have found the large parallax.
Because of the failure of this major goal, Tycho's reputation as
a very smart and program-motivated observer has suffered, but because of
this particular observational campaign, there were ultimately enough
astonishingly accurate Mars observations for Kepler's later studies to
succeed in finding the law of areas and the elliptical form of planetary
orbits.